If you are still taking these like 2 days before my birthday in March. Would you ever write a mobius-esque story where it has a circular structure and a twist somewhere that would change the context of it? (For at least the second reread.)

I think what you’re describing is more a style/technique than a plot concept.

The essence of a twist is to make everything up to that point mean something else entirely with the new context and so a second reread would be, inherently, different because the reader is informed of what will happen. So what you’ve described in the second half of your prompt is inherent to having a twist.

The first half, though, is interesting because… hm… a mobius-esque/circular structure does not necessarily require a twist. It CAN be that the mobius-esque/circule structure IS the twist (in that, plot twist, the beginning is the ending the characters are caught in an infinite loop) but that is not MANDATORY.

I think it depends on the… vibe? atmosphere?… that is the beginning/ending. If there mobius nature of the story is something that the readers realize (with, perhaps, dawning horror) then that is a twist. If it’s something the readers already know (and accept peacefully) then it’s not a twist, it’s just how the story is written.

But as I said before, anon, this is more of a style/technique than a plot concept, and while I think it would be cool to write I don’t know if I have the skill or appropriate story that would best suit this kind of structure.

I mean, given the recurring themes of this ask box event (or what few asks got through) this would be some kind of time travel / reincarnation / legacy inherited and passed down through the ages…

[Oh shit. This explains my bizarre choices in fanfiction rereads–lately I’ve been (re)reading Dark Is Rising and Inuyasha fic which are not fandoms I would normally associate with each other, but they do kind of have the above mentioned themes, I suppose.]

I mean, okay, in the twist of dawning horror type of story, the easiest thing I can think of is that the hero goes through their adventure and somehow becomes their own villain. Either time travel or non-chronological reincarnation, the hero decides that they have to preserve the timeline by living the villain’s life and then it turns out that there never was an “original villain,” just the hero fighting themselves over and over.

… but that’s not really something that would compel a person to reread it, would it? It’d be more of a “stunned and horrified, let me chew on the concept” sort of reaction, wouldn’t it?

I mean, having already brought up my current binge-reading of Dark Is Rising fic, I’ve always kind of wanted to write a fic in which Will Stanton, as the last Old One, goes back in time to teach Merlin, as the first Old One, because they are canonically part of a Circle. I had vague thoughts about making it a crossover with BBC Merlin and somehow incorporating canonical “normal childhood friend Will” into it, but then I stopped watching BBC Merlin after season two so…

But using that as an example as well as other!anon’s (or, at least, I think you’re a different anon?) missing “out-of-order student/teacher relationship” concept it’d be a whole I taught you but you were my teacher but I’m teaching you cycle. We are both teacher and student, ad nauseum. But in order to get that draw to reread it’d only be one character’s POV as they are teaching the other character and slowly realizing that their student was their teacher via flashbacks and “my teacher said their teacher once ended a war by pretending a crab was god and that sounded like an exaggeration because I definitely didn’t find any records of that, but desperate times call for desperate measures holy shit I can’t believe that worked.”

So that way it’d be more compelling to reread and see what little hints are sprinkled throughout.

All that being said, anon, maybe one day I’ll write something using this technique, but I don’t think I’m anywhere near that level yet… But thank you for the prompt, and again Happy Birthday! 😀